Great way to start 2012
Mike,
Great questions to set our orientation as we pass the artificial line of departure known as the New Year...
1. The powerful protect their own power, and the powerful protect the powerful. What you have to do is to convince the powerful that their position of power is unsustainable in the near term unless significant changes are made - you must create the sense of urgency that comes from a belief that crisis is imminent unless change is made. Perhaps this is done my adding preconditions to your cooperation that "nudge" those behaving badly in a specific direction, but I think the most effective way to do this is to convince them that the internal forces in their own system won't support the status quo much longer, and that they won't be able to keep their selfish and hypocritical practices out of the public eye any longer, no matter what the US says or does. And I think you have to clearly spell out limits to what you can look the other way on - there's no way we could support Saudi Arabia if they were doing what the Syrian government is doing to their people on a similar scale...
2. Even counterinsurgency done imperfectly sends a huge message - you don't want to be the next country that Uncle Sam stumbles into. That said, a full occupation with 3-24 doctrinal counterinsurgent ratios isn't necessarily needed to put a former leader in the docket or in the streets with those he formerly crushed with impunity, as we've seen recently. Each situation is specific and unique in a complex world. But the US can't "restore" an order that hasn't emerged yet, it can only help to steer bottom up movements in certain directions, and occasionally take some steps that apply pressure from the top down. No blanket answers for this one - the proper orientation going into the problem is more important than specific recommendations ahead of time.
3. Yes. This is an almost inevitable product of our internal political processes and reward systems even more than it is from our external policies. There are always overlapping priorities in play along different timelines and levels of scale - we like to pretend that we can present a unified coherent set of policies that address all of our interests at the same time, but in practice this is impossible. Half is how well you manage the balancing act, the other half is how well you spin the balance you've chosen to various audiences with different interests.
4. In general, it must provide a credible and capable threat to impose physical force in a wide range of scenarios. We must maintain the reputation we've earned as a professional, capable force that you don't want to tangle with force on force, and you think twice about engaging with assymetrically, and do so because it's your only realistic option.
5. By asking to "fix" institutions, you're suggesting that we understand the "problems" in the first place, and also that a fix in one will solve problems from that perspective without causing a whole lot more from other perspectives. As above, it's a balancing act in which you can "never do one thing", and in the real world, it's not a matter of "fixing" so much as it is managing the balance as best you can by "nudging" the system with the levers of influence available to you.
6. There is no real reform in a bureaucracy until the reward systems change - the current status quo of funding and rewarding (i.e. promoting) the services in separate bins has created some useful overlaps and variety that has helped the joint force cope with various unforeseen contingencies, but with the coming austerity such surplus and replication will be unsustainable. I'm not even getting into the mix between the DoD, Congress, and special interests here...The question is this: will real change, which means change in the fundamental DoD bureaucracy, come before or after a significant crisis? Can we all agree that the "boom" is coming so we can act to the left of it, or will we play the same "musical chairs" game that our government is playing on a larger scale, betting that we can get what we need to serve our own parochial interests before the "music" stops, and we realize that more than one chair got yanked while we were running circles around each other?
In closing, I'd like to say that it's a very good sign for 2012 that there are people out there like you who are asking these questions on the morning of Jan 1st instead of nursing their hangovers. Thanks for creating this forum, and staying continuously "on watch" even as others celebrate (and recover from) the freedom that we hope to preserve with the insights you're seeking here.
Cheers, and Happy 2012 to the entire SWJ community,
Sugar
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